Washington's Secret Garden
The News Tribune of Tacoma, WA, has an article on the showy stickseed, an endangered flower that has been poached to the point only 600 plants survive on 2-3 somewhere in the Cascade Ranges.
This is an example of taking the love of flowers too far, to the point the botanists and biologists studying the flower have to keep the location of the plants secret.
"The photographer who was with us yelled out, and we looked up and saw a woman running across the road with a plant in her hand, getting into her car," Thomas said. Plant survey crew members didn't try to intervene, he said.
"It happened in a flash. She was in the car and we were on foot," he said...
He said he was flabbergasted when he saw a different woman stop her car to grab a bouquet. Nobody knows whether those two women realized that the flowers they took are nearly extinct. Yet government officials purposely decline to use signs to remind visitors not to take plants, Thomas said.
That's smart, said Sarah Reichard, a University of Washington conservation biologist helping to devise a plan to revive showy stickseed.
"You don't call attention to something that's rare. It brings out the lust in people," she said.
It's sad that they can't even put up signs warning the illegality of removing the plants, because it would tip off the poachers. Although it seems to me they should put up the signs somewhere completely different, hundreds of miles away, and then keep moving them, so the poachers will wear themselves out trying to find flowers that aren't there. Maybe in a giant poison ivy patch...
